The Maze
My family has cut a corn maze into the north field every September since 1994. Hollander Farm Fall Fun: the maze, the pumpkin patch, the hayride, cider donuts in the barn. It pays the property taxes. It’s the only reason we still have the farm.
I’ve designed the maze since I was nineteen. You do it on graph paper first, then on the computer, and then you go out in the field when the corn’s about knee high with a GPS unit and a little walk-behind tiller and cut the paths, and it grows up around them. By October the corn is nine feet tall and you can’t see over it, and the only way to see the design is from the air. Every year a friend of my dad’s, who has a small plane, flies over and takes the picture we put on the website.
That’s how we see him.
He’s not in the design. He’s never in the design. He’s a shape in the corn that none of us cut, a clean path about two feet wide, in the outline of a person lying on his back. Head, shoulders, arms at his sides, legs together. He’s about sixty feet long. You can’t see him from the ground at all; inside the maze his path just looks like another dead end, or a long turn that doesn’t go anywhere. From the air he’s as clear as a chalk outline.
He’s in every one of the aerial photos, going back to the first one in 1994. I’ve lined them up on the wall of the farm office. He’s always in a slightly different place, and always in a slightly different position. One year his knees are drawn up. One year he’s on his side. One year, his hands are folded on his chest.
It looks like someone turning over in his sleep.
My grandfather was the one who told me the rule. I was maybe twelve. He’d taken me up to the farm office to show me the new photo, and I’d pointed and said, What’s that?, and he’d put his big hand flat on the glass over the shape, as if to keep it warm.
“That’s him,” he said. “He’s been in the north field longer than we have. Longer than the Pattersons who had it before us. You cut your paths however you like. But you don’t cut through him. You hear me? You go around.”
I asked him who he was. Grandpa thought about it for a long time.
“He’s sleeping,” he said. “The field keeps him. That’s all I know, and I don’t want to know any more, and neither do you.”
And so, every year, I went around. When I was laying out a design, I’d take the previous year’s photo and trace him onto the plan, and I’d work around him, so that none of my paths ever crossed his. It was easy. It was just one more rule of farming, like you don’t plant beans after beans. My dad thought it was superstition and said so, but he never once told me to stop.
Grandpa died in March. This year, my brother Kyle wanted to help with the maze. He’s twenty-two and he’s been reading about drone mapping, and he said the old way, my graph paper and my tiller and a GPS unit older than he was, was a waste of time. He flew a drone over the field at planting and made a map, and loaded my design into a tractor-mounted guidance system, and cut the whole maze in an afternoon.
He didn’t trace the old photo first. He didn’t know to. I didn’t think to tell him. I’d spent so many years going around the shape without thinking about it that it had never occurred to me anyone could do anything else.
The aerial picture came back in September. My maze was perfect: a big jack-o’-lantern this year, with a hayride wagon in its grin. And through the middle of it, right across the throat of the figure lying in the corn, ran one of Kyle’s straight, clean, machine-cut paths.
The maze opened on the last Saturday of September. It’s been busy. The weather’s been beautiful. Nothing happened, really, for the first week. Then the comments started on our page.
Loved the maze! The man in the overalls was SO helpful, he pointed us right to the exit.
Shoutout to the staff guy in the middle of the maze, my kids were about to lose it and he walked us out.
Ten stars. Who’s the actor? He doesn’t say anything, just points. Kind of creepy, great Halloween vibe.
We don’t have anyone in the maze. We never have. My mother runs the donut stand and my father does the hayride and Kyle does the parking and I take the tickets.
I went in myself, the Thursday after the first comments, alone in the afternoon when it was closed. I walked the whole thing. I walked to the place in the middle where Kyle’s path crossed him, a long dead end that went nowhere. The corn on either side of it was flattened, the stalks bent, the leaves pressed down into the dirt, the way a field looks where a deer has been lying. A big deer. Bigger than a deer.
It was still warm.
The second aerial photo came yesterday. Dad’s friend flies one more each October, for the Halloween posters. Dad brought it into the farm office and put it on the desk and didn’t say anything.
The figure is gone from the maze. There’s a sixty-foot gap where he used to lie, a shape of standing corn just a little greener than the rest. And from the throat of him, where Kyle’s path cut across, there’s a trail. Not a cut path. A trampled one, ragged, wandering, the corn pushed down along it. It goes out the edge of the field and across the hayride road and up the lawn toward the house.
It ends at the house. On the south side. Under my window.
There’s a shape there in the lawn, pressed into the grass. Sixty feet long. Lying on its side along the wall of the house, knees up, curled, like a dog sleeping across a doorway. Like something that’s woken up in a strange place and come looking for the warmest thing it could find.
I haven’t told anyone. Dad saw the picture, and Kyle hasn’t, and Mom won’t look at it. I’ve been sleeping on the couch in the farm office.
This morning, I walked around the house. The grass on the south side is pressed flat in a long curve against the foundation, and it doesn’t come back up, even after the dew.
I don’t know how to put him back. Grandpa never said. I don’t know if you can. All I know is what Grandpa told me, the last thing, when he was in the hospital and I thought he was talking about the farm.
“The field keeps him,” he said. “If the field ever stops keeping him, he’ll find something else that will.”